SOVIET UNION: Stalin's 100th

During the quarter-century of Stalin's iron rule over the U.S.S.R., the
dictator's birthday on Dec. 21 was cause for frenzied national
jubilation. As Stalin grew older, Pravda and every other Soviet
newspaper carried little else but good wishes to him from groups of
factory workers and collective farmers, some of whom would double their
production in his honor. But since the dictator's death in 1953, and
especially since Nikita Khrushchev's famed destalinization speech three
years later, few Soviet citizens have felt the urge to celebrate the...